A colleague and I have been leading forums on AI at our community college. Once per month, we meet with faculty and once per month with students. The discussions have been rich and we also share tools and ask other to share tools.
At our most recent forum, we were exploring Notebook LM. This is a tool provided by Google that allows users to upload, link, or paste text, and AI will summarize it. One thing we did was to upload a PDF file of a chapter I wrote a few years ago (here is the item on ResearchGate, contact me if you are interested in the full text). We used to the tool on Notebook AI to create a two-way deep dive conversation based on the chapter. I was impressed!
I posted the audio as a podcast (embedded below).
As an educator, I see possibilities for this. I do not want this to be my or my students’ replacement for reading. (Interestingly, a resounding theme of our conversations with students about AI has been that they want to learn to use AI as a tool. They want to become powerful readers and writers and thinkers.) By using AI to create audio summaries of texts central to our courses, we can give students another way to interact with the text. They can preview it, review it; both, we know, are associated with better learning.
Since COVID, I have become a fan of audio books. This has given me first-hand experience of the value of audio content. Audio makes me a stronger reader of the same text. Notebook LM and its capacity to quickly create audio companions to the texts we read and the texts we assign to students to read makes this a valuable cognitive tool.